Girls’ Last Tour Episode 11 Review: Culture – Destruction – Past

One episode left before the end of Girls’ Last Tour, and each is getting darker than the previous one. In this episode, Chito and Yuu face the reality of the existence of weapons of mass destruction.

Japanese Original Episode Title: 文化 / 破壊 / 過去

Plot

The girls are wondering with their new pet, Nuko, who can eat bullets and drink fuel. Chito finds an English book that she can obviously not read, but keeps it anyway, and Yuu finds an enormous bullet. To each his own. They also discover some sort of weird kinetic mechanism whose purpose is unknown to them, but Noko and Yuu climb it and play around with it anyway.

As they keep traveling, they find themselves in a place where a giant robot is falling apart, causing all sorts of debris to fly in their direction. When it’s safe, they investigate the robot, and thanks to Nuko’s help, they manage to get into its guts and turn it on. Yuu plays around clicking buttons, and bombs the nearby city, which is enveloped in flames in front of their very eyes. While Yuu considers this extremely funny, since there’s probably no people there, Chi gets really upset and pushes Yuu aside, yelling at her. They wait for the fire to cease, then take off again.

In the episode’s last part, following the radio waves that N3ko can detect, they pass through what looks like a futuristic wind far and discover an old submarine. They once more get in thanks to Nuko and snoop around.

Episode Highlights

Animal abuse, not: Well, Nuko is definitely not a cat. When Yuu started feeding it bullets I briefly freaked out, but apparently it’s some sort of evolved organism that has probably adapted to its environment in order to survive. So now it can eat gunpowder and drink fuel. Either that or it’s some sort of artificial life form, that can also be used like a tool, given it accurately perceives radio waves and can turns its limbs to screwdrivers.

But… is it art: I’m pretty sure the huge mechanism Yuu and Noko were climbing is some sort of kinetic sculpture without any other purpose. It sure looks like one. It’s entertaining to see Yuu reacting to it in this careless way.

Forest: As the girls are passing through the wind farm, Chito makes a reference to the fact that there used to be natural places like this one, filled with large plants that would grow very high. Of course, the conversation ends with Yuu asking about what happened to these places and why they have disappeared, and Chito answering that they know too little about the past.

War: Unlike dim-witted Yuu, Chito can make the connection between the existence of powerful weaponry and the extinction of humankind, which is probably why she doesn’t find mass destruction that funny.

Themes & Trivia

Nuko: Obviously a reference to the Japanese word Nuko, Nuko’s name actually means ‘saw’ (鋸, nokogiri). According to google translate, it can also mean ‘wild child’(野子).

War and Human Civilization: The book Chito finds might be Azar Gat’s ‘War in Human Civilization’ with a slightly varied translation. It is a historical book investigating the history of war since the beginning of humanity, and you can actually find it in any major bookstore. Chito makes a reference to its contents, discussing how some wars were caused by a variation on culture, and how the unknown causes fear to people, leading them to seek solutions to violence.

Here comes the mecha: I just knew that the girls would end up getting inside the robot and realizing it could be controlled by humans. Mecha is a huge tradition in anime and it would only make sense for massive robots controlled by humans existing in a dystopian future from a Japanese fictional perspective. However, to this day, mech suits are not a really popular war weapon, even though some people still insist on making them.

Signs: While someone should have spelled-check the ‘lanch’ button, and prevent me from getting hungry, the sign the girls find in the submarine means something like ‘quietness’ (静康, reads as shizuka ko)

War is not funny, okay

Cool episode, with a lot of references, and a lot of content to further look into. I’m really curious to see how the season is going to end. I wonder if they’ll just start going around in the submarine.

What did you think of this Girls’ Last Tour episode? Let us know in the comment section below! And don’t forget to check the rest of the Fall 2017 anime reviews on MANGA.TOKYO!